We appreciate the enormous support that our ABestWeb community has experienced over the many years it has served its members and sponsors. We have decided to exit this business and have placed the property up for sale and we are actively entertaining interest.

In the meantime, community members will be able to read but not post to ABestWeb beginning on Jan. 18.

We want to thank you for your numerous contributions and your ongoing support. If you have any questions, please let us know.

I may be crazy..but I think I read this somewhere and now can't seem to find it.
Anyway...does a search engine know if you have copied and pasted content into your site? And if so..does it hold it against the site?

The answer is it depends on the search engine. AltaVista, for instance, has an extremely harsh duplicate content filter whereas Google, uh, doesn't. AV's filter will often mean the removal of both pages from their index, whereas Google will generally remove only one. Inktomi is pretty good at identifying duplicate content also and depending on the intent, the pages either get removed or rank very poorly.

If you are talking about copying and pasting product info from merchant site's, then generally speaking it shouldn't be a problem in Google. Duplicate content in the search engine sense means more than just taking a paragraph from here or there.

However, I agree with AffiliateMakeover - it is pointless. You won't rank well with content that has been copied and pasted from elsewhere and it provides no value to your visitors, so why do it ?

I really appreciate the replies. My concern was: Product descriptions and also future plans for a content site. I was planning on letting people submit articles for the link exchange. I am sure the articles that they write end up on several sites so I wanted to be sure.
But it sounds like if my site is original and peppered with my own input it will be fine.

I have found that copying smaller product descriptions, etc. doesn't hurt anything with the SE's. But, I have also found that by improving the text that merchants provide us can improve ranking and eliminate the duplication problem. Also, the banner and graphic product links from some merchants have no "alt" text or "width/height" attributes. I rarely copy and paste without tweeking something.

Ernie

It may be that my sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.